Courtesy: Destiny Photography, by permission from Upsplash
POESIS: Power, Knowledge, and Servitude at Sea
A cross-institutional BCDSS–IDOS Research Group (2026–2033)
POESIS approaches the sea not as a passive backdrop, but as an archive in motion and a generative site of political and epistemic struggle. Rooted in histories of slavery, colonialism, and dispossession, and in critical dialogue with decolonial feminist, southern, and more-than-human thought, we investigate a defining tension of our present moment: how human and more-than-human life is rendered essential to projects of extraction, conservation, sustainability, and repair — while remaining structurally subordinate within the very formations that depend upon them.
Why saltwater worlds?
The ocean is one of the starkest sites of global inequality, where extraction, violence, and erasure are lived most intensely. Despite this, the power relations governing the sea remain strikingly undertheorised—persistently displaced by land-based frameworks. POESIS addresses this gap by investigating how imperial, racialized, gendered, and interspecies hierarchies evolve and are contested across mining frontiers, coastal archives, ports, shipping routes, estuaries, and littoral worlds
Our Core Questions
Two interconnected questions drive our work:
- How do particular knowledge-holders, labour practices, lifeworlds, and more-than-human relations become indispensable to projects of development, sustainability, and environmental repair — while remaining marginalised within the very structures they sustain?
- How are these dependencies interpreted, lived, and contested by those who bear them?
Photo credits: Nilantha Ilangamuwa
How we work
Our work is structured around two organising concepts. Epistemic dependency examines how authority is structured — whose knowledge and labour are made indispensable, and at what cost. Ecological servitude investigates how the natural world is increasingly enrolled as functional and salvific labouring infrastructure within regimes of sustainability.
These concepts animate four interlinked research areas: epistemic, extractive, submerged, and disposable dependencies. Across all four, we combine ethnographic, historical, and artistic methods to reveal both the concealed dynamics and the hyper-visible struggles of oceanic and littoral worlds.